Teen smiles

Over the years, the Teen has decorated her door on a number of occasions. It has held photos of herself with her cousins, school projects, art works and other items.
It’s current incarnation is a collage of photos of herself and her school friends (taken in the school yard) and many of the things that they say.
Many of the photos, match the sayings that have been stuck around it.

Sunday Stills Challenge and other random ramblings…..

Happy Monday world!
What?
It’s not Monday in your part of the world yet?
Not to worry. It soon will be. 😉

As I type this I am once again seated at my infamous messy creative space. Actually, it is a lot messier now as I am still scanning photos and have them scattered around the place. I have a feeling that I am doubling up on my scanning and have the same photo in more than one category folder but oh well. 🙂 I guess that just makes them easier to find later.

Someone put a book on her head!!

Last night I was looking at my Tween (who will become a Teen before very long). She doesn’t like me looking at her. She thinks that when I do something is wrong and she become self conscious so I try to watch her surreptitiously.
As I was gazing at my little girl and remembering the chubby faced cherub with the ready smile she turned toward me and my memories dropped away.

Kids these days….

What does any self-respecting tween do in the morning before school? They get together with their best friend and participate in the Ice Bucket Challenge for Motor Neuron Disease (that’s what we call it in Australia).
Last night, she filled the ice trays in the freezer in preparation for the predicted warm, sunny weather of the next day.
However things don’t always go to plan.
And the weather doesn’t always do what the weatherman says it will.

Expectations and Disappointments

There are many times in our lives when our expectations of people, places and things don’t measure up. Sometimes it is because we have set our standards too high I believe. However if you don’t have standards to set then you will never have a yardstick to measure anything with.
I am guilty of expecting much from myself and then becoming disappointed with the results. I do it all the time.
It isn’t really fair to myself to do this either however I continue to do it.

Lessons from the young

The other day whilst visiting my family, we were sitting around the table after lunch and discussing the issues of the world and trying to solve them (as you do). The topic turned to a couple of high profile news stories in the media right now involving celebrities and sports stars.
We were then discussed a certain rugby league player who has just lost his place on his team due to a social media blooper.

Discussing allegations against other people, I said “Generally when there is smoke, there is fire”.
To which the Tween replied “But sometimes there is smoke because someone is just trying to start a fire”.

Very wise words from one so young.

Last night I was a Dance Mom!

And for those of you in Australia, that was not a mis-spelling of Mum 😉
Let’s set the scene…..
The Tween is a massive Dance Moms fan as some of you may have read before. She is constantly watching it on Foxtel and she has the first two seasons on DVD. She follows all the mothers on Twitter and Instagram. She comes to me all excited when one of the mothers favourites a tweet or answers her.
So when she found out that Christi and Chloe were coming to Australia……

Internet – friend or foe?

I was looking through my stats this morning and decided to check out the search terms that have brought people to my blog. Some of it is very interesting and due to the nature of my blog, most of those terms are harmless e.g. “Nick Vujicic quotes”, “Bethany Hamilton” and even “Don Charisma”. I have blogged about each of these people so it stands to reason. There are search terms relating to the book review that I did last year and some that are outrageously funny that I have no idea why my blog would even come up such as “You suck stinker yahoo”, “vertically challenged” and my all time favourite “If you fail a high school course”.

However this morning, there were three separate search terms that rang alarm bells with me and they were all about tween selfies. I put those terms into google and came up with my blog as the first port of call. That scared me however I’m sure whoever put the term in would have been terribly upset with the photos they found because I’ve purposely chosen unflattering photos of the Tween to share. (Not trying to make light of this but a little humour never goes astray). What scares me is that people out there are looking for the pictures that children are posting of themselves online and I’m here to tell you that some of those pictures are not appropriate.

The internet is a god send in so many ways. It is definitely the ‘Information Super Highway’ but as with any action – there is an equal and opposite reaction. Good versus bad. Whilst the majority of people in the world use it for the purposes of good – continuing education, communication with others, networking and looking for information there are those who use it for reasons of exploitation.

To say that this gave me a fright this morning is an understatement. I am very careful about not sharing too many personal details about my children and partner however I wonder if I should take the further step of removing photos of my daughter from my blog? The subject of her selfies is something that causes amusement within my family however there are obviously people out there who see it as something else.
Or perhaps I am over reacting and the search terms were merely put in by a concerned parent researching things in order to educate their own children or doing research for a university paper … or something like that.
I don’t know.

However, I do know that whilst the internet is wonderful  – there is a much darker side.